Thunberg, other youths, prosecute our inaction

Earnestness, especially when expressed by a teenager, is easy to dismiss, to mock, even.

In expressing her fear and horror that the world is not acting with enough urgency to confront the coming ecological disaster of climate change, Greta Thunberg is earnest and emotional.

She’s also right.

Thunberg is the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist who started a youth climate strike a year ago, which she then brought to the United States in recent weeks to speak to members of the U.S. Congress and the United Nations General Assembly.

Her message Monday, during a U.N. climate summit was blunt and confrontational.

“This is all wrong,” she told the conference in New York on Monday, The Washington Post reported. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?”

She wasn’t there to offer hope but to prosecute inaction, inaction that doesn’t just threaten disaster. That disaster has already arrived.

“People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystem are collapsing,” she said. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?”

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-thunberg-other-youths-prosecute-our-inaction/